The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  I feel stripped.

  And, what's more disarming, I feel like Sasha Rusalev again.

  I see that Liwen is studying me, her gaze lingering on my hands, my face, my throat. There is nothing intimate or erotic about that look, only a kind of focused concentration, and in a flash I understand it for what it is: the careful, clinical attention of a naturalist, trying to record in her memory this one specimen of a species she will never see again.

  Yueyin is studying me, as well.

  "Younger than I thought," she says. "And handsome." It sounds more like an indictment than a compliment. "At first I thought you were here to live out some colonialist harem fantasy, but now I don't think so." She pauses, and then asks: "Gay?"

  "Yes. And before you formulate your next hypothesis, I'm not here because I think Amazon Fever will make a woman of me, either."

  Yueyin shrugs. "It does happen. Once since I came here, two or three other times in Eth Service records. Mystics who don't believe in gene therapy or reconstructive surgery. The Fever kills them just like any other man. But you're not a mystic, are you?"

  Now it's my turn to shrug. "I'm a natural philosopher, and I was trained in the Caliphate. Sometimes the line is hard to draw."

  "Let me guess," Liwen says in her accented Arabic. "You think you have a cure for Amazon Fever."

  "More or less," I tell her.

  "That also happens," Yueyin says. "Every decade or so the Republic will land an automated lab with a cage full of male gerbils, to test the latest medical miracle."

  "The Fever kills them, too," Liwen says.

  "That's because the Fever's not a medical problem," I say. "It's just a symptom of a causality violation effect."

  "You say that as if it meant something," says Liwen.

  "It does to me." I take a sip of tea, and then as I set the cup down, an analogy comes to me. "Look," I say, pointing to the cup. "The Consilium—the Phenomenological Service, I mean—they think the universe is like the water in this teacup. The leaves are Hippolyta's causal anomaly. And the Fever is what happens when you put them together—the Fever is the tea."

  "And the blockade is there to keep the tea from diffusing any further." Liwen lifts her own teacup and swirling it around. "You are here to take the leaves out."

  I start to answer, but Yueyin cuts me off.

  She looks me in the eye. "If you could cure the fever," she says, "you'd be destroying the basis of Hippolytan society. Not just the society, but the whole ecology. There's only one male organism on this planet, and he's sitting on my couch."

  "I said the Phenomenological Service thinks that way. I didn't say I do."

  "You're not with the PS?"

  "I'm not with the Consilium at all. I'm sponsored by the London Caliphate's Irrationality Office, but for all practical purposes, I'm on my own."

  Yueyin looks skeptical. "What are you here to do, then?"

  I sigh. "This is where the metaphors start to break down. Say the universe is a cup of water. Perhaps the anomaly is like a bundle of tea leaves—in which case the Fever, the diffusion, is irreversible. No one knows how to reverse entropy on that scale. And if it isn't contained, it will spread.

  "On the other hand, perhaps the anomaly is like a pebble dropped in the cup. Perhaps the Fever is only a ripple on the surface of the water, dissipating the energy of the splash. When the energy is gone, so are the ripples."

  "In which case we're doomed anyway." Yueyin says. "But I don't believe it."

  "Tell me," I say. "Spontaneous fertility in the Ezheler lands—at the edge of the anomalous region—is it increasing, or declining?"

  "There's no hard evidence either way," says Yueyin, looking uncomfortable. "Anecdotally—"

  "Anecdotally, it's declining. Isn't it?"

  She looks away. "It might be."

  "Look," I say. "I'm not here to destroy your society. I'm here to liberate it. You said you don't want your daughter to grow up in a prison."

  Yueyin says, "We don't want her to grow up to be some man's wife, either."

  I shake my head. "This is not just about you. Hippolyta is one world. There's half a trillion women out there." I wave an arm at the ceiling, trying to encompass the whole Polychronicon. "Don't you think they deserve a chance to have what you have?"

  In Liwen's face I see understanding dawn. "You are not trying to eradicate Amazon Fever," she says. "You are trying to control it."

  "I still don't understand," Yueyin says.

  "I told you this was where the metaphors break down," I say. "I can't describe it with teacups."

  "Without teacups," Liwen says.

  "Without teacups?" I take a deep breath. "I'm hoping to use a Caliphate mathematical technique to establish a metastable equilibrium that allows convex regions with real and virtual histories to coexist in four-dimensional space-time, while remaining both topologically distinct and contiguous in five-space."

  Yueyin rolls her eyes. "Never mind what you're doing," she says. "What does it mean? To us?"

  "It means, if I succeed, that your daughter will be able to choose how she wants to live. Your daughter"—I gesture outward again—"and everyone else's."

  "Why should we believe you?"

  I shrug. "Does it matter? I'll be out of your way tomorrow in any case. I'm going north, to Erethea." I take a sip of tea. "If you want to stop me, I'm sure it won't be difficult."

  Liwen says something to Yueyin in Tieshanese. Conversations in the Chinese languages always sound like arguments to me, but in Yueyin's reply I hear not just disagreement, but scorn—and yet, a sort of resignation.

  She gets up, then, and goes upstairs.

  "You can sleep on the couch tonight," Liwen says. "I will get you some sheets. The bath house is out back, if you want to clean up."

  "Thank you."

  "I am sorry about Yueyin," she says as she tidies up the tea set. "What you have to understand is that for her, it is not enough that on Hippolyta we, women, can live without men. That Hippolyta is a place where men cannot come is also important." She glances at the piled cloth next to me and smiles. "For Yueyin the Fever is the perfect hijab."

  "And for you?" I ask.

  She shrugs. "Yueyin, she chose to come here. As for me, I am happy here—but it is where I was born. If I had been born elsewhere, probably I would be happy there."

  She is quiet for a moment, as if debating whether to say more.

  "I think you do not know what you are getting into," she says.

  "What do you mean?"

  "You are right, the Fever is just a side effect of some kind of causality violation. Whatever its origin, the center is up there, in Erethea."

  "That's why I'm going," I tell her.

  She sighs and looks down, tracing invisible pictures with a finger on the tabletop.

  "I have been up there three times," she says. "Not all the way." She looks up. "How can I explain it? You know the tombs you saw on the way into town, at the south end of the island, the Men's Cemetery?"

  I nod.

  "You will find Men's Cemeteries, tombs like that, all over the south. But not in Erethea. In Myrine—that is the first big city, up the river—in Myrine all they have is a cenotaph. Nobody knows what happened to the bodies. In Themiscyra they do not even have that; when they talk about men it's like they're talking about a metaphor, or a myth."

  I smile. "Maybe that's healthier."

  A laugh escapes Liwen's lips, and she shakes her head.

  "Maybe it is," she says. "Tell me—why are we worth dying for?"

  "I don't expect to die."

  "But you know it's a possibility."

  I look away. This is the question everyone danced around—my teachers, my apprentices, the Physics Guild, the Irrationality Office, the Republic's military attaché in London. I distracted them with good manners and mathematics, and let them fill in their own answers, from altruism to neurosis.

  "In the early days of Western psychology," Liwen says, "for someone to be attracted to o
ne of her own sex was considered a symptom of an inability, on her part, to distinguish between the Self and the Other. Like an infant who does not yet understand the difference between her toys and her own limbs—and puts both of them in her mouth. If that were true. . . then altruism might be very close to narcissism."

  I look back at her.

  "Yueyin was right not to believe me," I tell her. "I'm not here because I want to help you. I'm here because I'm the kind of person who can't look at a knot without wanting to untie it."

  "There is a verse from the Tao Te Ching," Liwen says. "It is ambiguous, of course, especially in Arabic, but one reading would be: 'The perfect knot leaves no end to be untied.'"

  "I wouldn't be here if I thought this knot was perfect," I say. "If what's happened on Hippolyta can happen once, it's probably happening all the time—it's just that most causal anomalies don't have measurable effects. And when one does, the Phenomenological Service—or someone like them—covers it up, locks it away. If I want to untie that knot—Hippolyta might be my only chance."

  "And for this you are willing to die."

  "If it comes down to it, yes." I shrug. "We live in an acausal universe. Isn't that enough justification for anything?"

  "Another verse might read: 'Who distinguishes herself from the world may be given the world,'" Liwen says. "'Who regards herself as the world may accept the world.'"

  She finishes her tea, and stands up.

  "You are crazy," she says, looking down at me. "I respect that in a scientist. Good night."

  "Thank you," I say. "Good night."

  * * *

  The ferry, the Jing Shi, has a smell that is somehow both sweet and cold, like metal and poison. The exhaust from the two big engines smells like burning plastic.

  I hoped to talk more with Mei Yueyin about Hippolyta's geography and demographics, to get more of a sense of the causal anomaly's macroscopic effects, but when I awoke this morning, she was already gone. Probably just as well.

  I place my brown hands on the sweating white-painted rail, feeling the engines' vibration, and look out across Haimingdao Channel at the complex of lights and smokestacks and tanks and buildings, the tall gantries that will lift up Liwen's rockets.

  Lift them, and launch them to certain death at the hands of Tenacious and its particle-beam satellites. I wonder what Lieutenant Addison and his sober-minded brother officers would see in all this.

  They'd admire the mad bravery of it, I expect. The madness whose mirror Liwen saw in me. And then they'd shoot to kill.

  * * *

  North. The Jing Shi advances stubbornly against the stiff current, like a peasant grandmother bent under a bundle of sticks. I'm sick, according to the medical monitors—my temperature's a degree above normal, and my white blood cell count is elevated.

  It might be the onset of the Fever. It might just be something I picked up at Yueyin's dinner table.

  The inference engines are agitated, murmuring to themselves, but they seem to think my little bubble of reality, pushing back Hippolyta's intrusion, is intact. I speak to the ship's nurse and get a bottle of antipyretics, fat white pills with a sour taste that stays in the mouth a long time after they're swallowed.

  * * *

  At Myrine the rivers come together, the Ortigia from the west emptying into the Otrera. The Jing Shi will continue northeast up the Otrera to Themiscyra, but it will stop overnight here, taking on fuel, exchanging one cargo for another.

  I spend the day ashore, taking a rattling electric tram from the port into the oldest part of the city.

  In a street café I watch the sparrows that hop from ground to table to chair, alert for crumbs. All are female, of course, their heads small, their plumage uniformly brown.

  Myrine is cleaner than Haiming, and quieter, though still bustling with prosperity. The streets in this neighborhood, narrow, built for pedestrians, with their quaintly modern pre-Fever buildings, are cheerful and filled with color, crowded with small bright shops and their customers, young women and girls with brown or blonde hair, chattering in a Turkish-German creole that I can almost understand.

  The shaded square the café looks out onto is an island in the middle of all that, an island of muted colors and quiet. In the center of the square is the Men's Cenotaph. I am not sure what I expected—some phallic obelisk or pillar, perhaps, topped with a muscular and well-endowed statue in classic European style?

  What there is, instead, is a circular arrangement of dark slabs and broken walls, very stark, radiating grief. From a distance the stones look as though they might be inscribed with names. But close up, the letters dissolve into abstraction.

  * * *

  I return to the Jing Shi at evening, boarding in the bustle of new passengers coming aboard. Most of them are Tieshanese, immigrants or expatriates; a few are Erithean, those who don't have the money for the trains or the fast hydrofoils, and who don't mind a little adventure.

  One of these is a young woman who shares my cabin, an economics student from Antiope—one of the cities beyond Themiscyra, in east Erethea—going home for the holidays. She is thin and muscular and dark. At night she takes off her khimar, revealing hair that is black and tightly curled and very short, like Musa's. In certain lights she looks like a boy.

  The bunks have curtains, but I do not close mine—the two small portholes let in little enough fresh air as it is. Neither does my student. She doesn't know what to make of me, hidden behind my burka, with my Ezheler accent and my rough-spun saddlebag that smells of mules and spices. To her I am exotic and dangerous and, I think, a little exciting.

  As a European I am the product of a culture—a history, oral and written—which constructs my particular sexuality in a certain way. In the early days of that history the love of women was by many considered an inferior but still marginally acceptable substitute for the love of men.

  Perhaps for some it still is, but not for me. And, even if it were—probably there are a few women on Hippolyta, here and there, who lie awake at night dreaming of the men they have never seen. But to expect this boyish student to be one of them—how stupid would I need to be?

  At night, by the dim glow of the emergency lights, I look across the cabin at the back of her sleeping head, and I try to remember what it felt like to run my fingers through Musa's hair. Whatever the young woman in the other bunk wants, her desires and mine are at right angles.

  I am glad of the burka. Beneath it I am not sure whether I want to laugh or cry.

  * * *

  Alarm!

  I leap up and slam my head painfully against the ceiling. The inference engines are howling for my attention —

  No.

  There is only silence.

  I ask the engines for a deliberate report, making them take their time about it. Everything is smooth and quiet, quieter than it's been since I landed, to the limit of the inference engines' precision. The bubble of reality around me seems to have expanded to the horizon. It's almost as if I weren't on Hippolyta at all.

  Did I imagine the alarm? The inference engines' logs admit to nothing.

  We're still a day from Themiscyra. I settle back into my bunk, not needing the medical monitors to tell me how fast my heart is pounding. My head aches, not just where I struck the top of it but all the way through. Beneath the burka a rash has raised itching red bumps on my forearms and the backs of my hands, on my ankles and the tops of my feet. I feel the student's eyes on me and turn my face to the bulkhead.

  * * *

  In the morning the inference engines are still annoyingly calm; smug, even—unwilling to admit the existence of any boundary between Hippolyta's divergent history and my own.

  The medical monitors, on the other hand, are gone.

  Coincidence? Or did the ferry cross some threshold in the night, some line drawn across space or time or probability, cutting the monitors' simultaneity channels?

  My head hurts. I should have a theory, but I don't. I borrow a pencil from the purser and doodle
graphs and formulas for a little while, but Hippolyta is not something that can be solved with partial differential equations, and before long I lose interest. I spend the day sitting on a bench on the deck, in the shade, watching the eastern shore crawl slowly by: six, eight, ten shades of green, with here and there the white or yellow or blue of a house peeking out. I drink lukewarm barley tea, and every three or four hours I take one of the antipyretics I cadged from the nurse.

  What could I do—turn around? I knew when I came that there was no way back. If the inference engines have truly broken down, run up against some flaw in the equations, then even returning to Tieshan, or beyond into the Ezheler lands, would not save me. And if it did, I would still die someday, still not knowing the truth.

  I feel as though I am on the verge of understanding something. That soon it will steal up to me, like a wild animal in a field, if only I sit here quietly enough.

  * * *

  Themiscyra. The city comes on us at dusk, the trees backing away from the banks, revealing fields, pastures, gardens, roads, buildings. There are other boats on the river; their wakes slap against the ferry's hull, and a distant noise of traffic begins to rise, in counterpoint to the rhythm of our engines.

  As I fall asleep lights are coming on, all along the bank.

  * * *

  The purser shakes me awake.

  "All ashore that's going ashore," she says, smiling.

  I shiver and try to smile back, forgetting for the moment that she can't see my face. By the time—after I stand, with help from the railing, and with some effort get my bag onto my shoulder—that I remember this, and turn to thank her out loud, she is gone.

  The city is all around now. The boat has docked in the shadow of a bridge, wide and solid, metal perhaps colorful by day but now black over black water, hiding the night sky. I am almost the last passenger to shuffle down the gangplank and onto the quay, turning only at the end to look up and down the river. Both banks are lined with lights, ribbons and arches and towers in a hundred architectural styles, shining crystalline against the night, reflecting in the dark water, for all the world like Petersburg or Baghdad or Ho Chi Minh Ville—except that a tower is just a tower, here, and an arch is just an arch. It's larger and more prosperous than I expected. A wide pavement runs along the bank, crowded with women of every age and color and language.